I love when one of the fantastic Designers are picked as the Polly. I love it because sometimes we forget they are scrappers also. I think you will be surprised (some of you) to know Sara Gleason was a Polly first….and one of the first Pollys brought in during the first ever Polly call in July 2009. I remember that call, and each and every person picked was like jaw dropping awesome in my book. I have to admit to stalking Sara a bit, because of her love of a story. I asked her what moves you to scrap, and this is her response:
“When I think of what moves me to create, it all comes down to the story. As deep into the History of Me as I can recall, there was always storytelling. There were books, there was writing. There were hours and hours spent slowly flipping through the photo albums that lay on grandma’s coffee table. There were the times we’d all gather closely together, the whole family, in the dark as faded images click-click-clicked onto a screen pulled down before us. There were the stories I dictated – before I could even write – to my mother, who jotted them down in notebooks. There were the crayon-sketched illustrations that accompanied said stories. There were the school essays and the adolescent attempts at original poetry. There were the “mix” tapes, the notes kept in boxes for years, and there were the journals.
Now there are the photographs. The scrapbook pages. The paper pages. The digital ones. The journaling. The blog posts. And tweets. And the notes kept in boxes for years. After I got married, I fell even more deeply in love with storytelling. I was moved by tradition. I was moved by the notion of building my own family and building my own legacy. I was moved by wanting to document. I was moved by creativity. I was moved…to speak. To not forget. And so I started scrapbooking. I was a paper scrapper for a long time and I still have a closet full of scrapbooking supplies that I love to play with from time to time. But when I discovered digital scrapbooking a few years ago it was like sun & water to my flower. My creativity blossomed in ways it hadn’t before and it really inspired me to tell the story of my family with new energy and dedication. And along the way I was encouraged to make my page designs into templates for other scrapbookers, and later, to create scrapbooking products.”
I went through Sara’s gallery, and you will be amazed how her pages even from 2009 are just as fresh and awesome today. Her abilitiy to tell a story with the photograph and words are perfection in this one called E is for Expressive:
Sara’s ability to get her emotions across on her pages is no secret. She does with such grace and kindness, that it makes me want to know her more. I think it would be such a delight to sit across a table and just laugh about life with her!
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